Indian Institute of Management (IIM) Ahmedabad topped the management institutions category in the India Rankings 2017, the 2nd edition of the ranking for higher institutions of learning released by the the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) on March 4.

IIM Bangalore was pushed to the second spot, that was occupied by IIMA in 2016. IIM Calcutta was ranked 3, remaining in the same spot as in previous year. IIM Lucknow also maintained the 4th rank position.

IIM Kozhikode climbed one spot to rank 5th replacing IIM Udaipur that fell to the 15th rank. The sixth, sevnth and eighth ranks went to Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, IIT, Kharagpur and IIT, Roorkee respectively.

Xavier Labour Relations Institute (XLRI), Jamshedpur was the only private management institute to figure in the top ten at 9th rank. IIM Indore was ranked 10th, the same position it held in the 2016 rankings.

The ranking was based on five criteria — Teaching and Learning Resources (TLR), Research and Professional Practice (RPC), Graduation Outcome (GO), Outreach & Inclusivity (OI) and Perception (PR). All institutions were judged based on self-disclosure of information.

IIMA got an overall score of 78.96, TLR of 90.71, RPC of 51.44, GO of 90.36, OI of 85.77 and PR of 96.73.

In the case of IIMB, the overall score was 78.82 and TLR 84.48. It was ahead of IIMA in terms of RPC at 62.56, GO at 91.33 and OI at 87.05 but fell to 77.37 in PR.

A total of 2995 institutions had participated in India Rankings 2017 under various categories. They included 232 Universities, 1024 Engineering Institutions, 546 Management Institutions, 318 Pharmacy Institutions and 637 General Degree Colleges.

Several of these have participated in multiple disciplines, adding to a total of 3319 participants across disciplines.

Releasing the rankings, Union Minister for Human Resource Development (HRD) Prakash Javadekar said it was meant to bring about fair competition among the institutions in pursuit of excellence.

Until now National Assessment and Accreditation Council (NAAC) and National Board of Accreditation (NBA) used to assess educational institutions. The government went in for this modification of handing it over to NIRF for bringing transparency and credibility, he added.

The parameters used for India Rankings 2017 are broadly similar to those used last year. However, at the level of detail, some of the sub-parameters have been tweaked for a more robust system of rankings.

In particular, for evaluating Research Impact, parameters for quality of publications have been enhanced to include the number of highly cited papers, in addition to the usual parameters of publications per faculty and citations per paper, the Minister said.

Innovations have also been made in improving the scoring metrics, where the “percentile” metric has been replaced by a more discriminating metric.

All research related information, including publications, citations, highly cited papers and even patent information about institutes was collected from third party databases (from industry partners) to obtain an objective and unbiased picture.

For this year’s Perception inputs, a large data base of academic and industry peers and employers was deployed, in addition to getting inputs from members of general public. Provision has also been made for the scale of operations of an institute in terms of the size of its student population and graduated doctoral students, he added.

The data received from both institutional and third party sources were subject to extensive scrutiny for consistency and correctness by a team of experts.